


To Serve the King That's Good and Kind

by Serindrana



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: F/M, Prostitution, Self-Destruction, problem drinking, symbolic prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-08
Updated: 2011-09-08
Packaged: 2017-10-23 12:50:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,694
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/250485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serindrana/pseuds/Serindrana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He, who had been forced to drag himself along the bottom of society, craved the power she offered him. She, who had lost her ideals and the order of her life, clung to the structure he offered her." Two exiles meet in an Ostwick bar, one full of doubt and another without direction. Post-Origins, Alistair/Cauthrien.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Serve the King That's Good and Kind

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Problem drinking, self-destructive behavior, off-screen prostitution, symbolic prostitution
> 
> A/N: The title comes from a (modified) line of one version of the song _Over The Hills and Far Away_ , a British empire patriotic song from the 18th century.
> 
> Beta'd by the wonderful Smaragdina and Cherith

When she walked into the seedy little tavern in Ostwick that had become her temporary home, slick with sweat and nails crusted with dirt, the last person she expected to see was Alistair Theirin. But there he was, unmistakable, leaning on the bar, unwashed and slumped in the too-familiar posture of somebody three sheets to the wind.

There was a moment in that first glimpse, that unbelieving recognition, where she almost thought that it was King Cailan there, back from the dead to haunt her. But it was only Alistair, almost-king, bastard son of Maric, the exiled Warden. It was only one of the last remaining threats to Ferelden from the Blight.

She stood in the doorway unmoving, unsure of what to do.

He was a far sight from how she'd seen him last, determined and a little nervous and a bit proud as the Warden at his side had talked her down from the Landsmeet doors. He no longer carried himself like a soldier, a warrior. He wore a dagger at his belt, not a sword, and his gaze was quick and furtive when he glanced around the bar, despite the empty mugs in front of him.

The last she had heard, he had been in Orlais.

But that had been months ago, just before Anora had passed her sentence and Cauthrien had been sent from Ferelden in shame, stripped of her command and her knighthood, relegated to nothing but what she was now, a mercenary without a home, a woman who killed for no ideal except the coin she needed for a room and whisky to dull the pain.

She had been forced from the only home she had ever known, the only mother, the only pride. She had lost Ferelden. She had wandered through Orlais, and then Nevarra, and then the Free Marches. She had taken mercenary work when she could stomach it and turned down offer after offer of employment by Orlesian nobles who wanted a trophy soldier or a trophy bed warmer.

And now she was in Ostwick, miserable little Ostwick, in a miserable little tavern, and there was Alistair Theirin, maybe-king of a nation that no longer welcomed her.

She wanted to strangle him. She wanted to yell at him to leave, to take his taunting bit of home with him, to go back to a purpose, a calling, that might still accept him. It hurt to look at him. It enraged her.

He looked more broken than she, wearing ratty clothes he hadn't bothered to patch, boots that looked stained by a million sewer outflows. The dagger at his belt was not well-made. He drank the cheapest swill they had on tap, and he drank it eagerly.

In the end, she simply laughed, a quiet, bitter, dark thing. She bowed her head and took her usual seat and soon her usual first cup of whisky was in her hand without her needing to utter a single word. That was enough. It was always enough.

  
**\--**   


He was there every night for the next week.

He never seemed to see her and she never approached him, though the sight of him always drew her towards angry, frustrated, bitter laughter. She watched him. His clothes grew more worn and dirty by the day and his hair was longer than she had ever seen it and matted. His skin was growing sallow.

Nobody ever sat with him. Nobody sat near him, either, though on several occasions a man would approach the almost-king and bend his head to say a few words, and Alistair's shoulders would tense and he would shake his head. Sometimes he slammed a hand down onto the bar. Other times he left the building.

But most of the time, he was alone. His shoulders were bowed. His mug wavered on its frequent trips to his lips. His eyes were distant when he did not scan the tavern with a strange, darting look.

He was drunk.

So was she.

She hadn't often been before the Blight, but serving at Loghain's side had led her to pick up his habits. Long nights sitting up with him, staring at maps and intercepted missives and trying decide on a next move while listening all the while for spies had left her with little other choice. He had always molded her, from the day he told a gangly farming girl to come with him and serve Ferelden until the day of the Landsmeet where she saw him drink two bottles of wine before lunch and heard for the first time of the plot to sell Denerim's elves to the Imperium.

Every doubt she had he had given her. He had given her, too, every answer to the realization that she'd been wrong to support him.

She slept less these days. Drank more. She was paranoid and anxious and fixated on her home, on the dangers posed to it.

She wondered if Alistair counted as one of them.

There were evenings when she played with her boot knife, considering simply running him through. She could send his head back to Anora; perhaps that would help bring her home. Perhaps that would give her back her rank, her command.

But it wouldn't, and after pressing the blade into the wood of her table, she sheathed it and went back to her whisky.

  
**\--**   


By the second week, she began to look at him not as the usurper bastard, not as a possible threat or a ticket home, but as the last of the Theirin bloodline. He looked less like Cailan and more like a fading man named Alistair every day, with every mug of cheap ale and rare small cup of stronger booze. Her attention fixated on him. Even when she staggered back to the tavern injured from a botched job, she patched herself up quickly and took her seat again. When she drank, she didn't always notice how many cups she consumed, so busy was she staring at a man across the tavern who still never seemed to see her for all his occasional nervous energy.

Thoughts of the past, of Ostagar and after, faded for the first time in months.

Each night she sat in the main tavern until well past the midnight bell. She watched him each night as he either ran out of coin buying oblivion or fell into a daze slumped at the bar.

And the next night he would return with coin anew.

She didn't want to know what he did for coin, but his fingers appeared more nimble than she would have guessed and his mouth on occasion looked reddened and used. She noticed with more sickened interest the men who approached him, the times that Alistair left the tavern only to return later in the evening with money once more.

Her king. No, her almost-king - but he could have been, so easily, and had things been different, she certainly would have followed him. If the Warden had wed him off to Anora, uniting the warring factions, Cauthrien would have followed.

He didn't deserve this.

She approached him. She wanted merely to put coin on the table for him, or into his money pouch, even though she knew it would go to nothing but more drink. She wanted to sustain him without debasing him, because he was the only piece of Ferelden she had left to serve, the only piece of home she could protect from what had become a self-appointed post in miserable little Ostwick, drinking herself to death every night. She came up to the bar and, without a word, placed two sovereigns recently earned by blood and sweat next to his fingers, and then turned to leave.

Those fingers wrapped tightly around her wrist.

"Hey-" the man said, and at first there was only question there. But then she looked back to him and he met her eyes and she saw the change, the recognition. She had dragged this man to Fort Drakon, had him stripped down before her and had ordered him be put to the knife until he revealed Orlesian plots. She had left him and his half-brother and so many men to die at Ostagar. She had strangled a country at her lord's order.

And he knew her for who she was, face contorting with rage. " _You_ ," he said, his voice unsteady but filled with anger, determination. "You _blighted harpy_ -"

"Unhand me," she said, struggling to keep her voice level and firm. "You have my support."

"Your support!" His laugh was bitter and his eyes grew distant. "Your support," he repeated. "The support of Loghain's whore. Wonderful. _Just_ what I needed."

The word rang in her ears and she colored, careful control fraying fast. She almost countered with, _and what are you, then_? after everything she'd seen, but the words wouldn't leave her throat. She tugged against his grip again, and again he didn't move.

"I am not a whore," she growled when he only sneered at her, shaking his head, looking lost and broken and more than a little dangerous. "I am a _soldier_ of _Ferelden_."

"A soldier who sold her soul to a madman. Who let him use her to kill thousands," he spat. "Yes, just a soldier. Not a whore at all. Tell me, did he fuck you that well, that you would destroy an Order for him? Kill a king for him?"

When she tried to wrench her wrist from his grip again, he stood and drew close. She could smell the alcohol on his breath, acrid and thick, but she wasn't much better. She had four glasses of whisky burning in her stomach, in her veins, and she scowled, standing her ground when retreat became impossible.

"I did not kill King Cailan."

"No, you just left him to die, to be strung up naked on a Blighted _shrine_. We burned him. We gave him the funeral he deserved. And where were you? In the capital? Sucking Loghain's-"

She struck him.

" _Do not speak of him_. I gave you coin for your drinks because you were once almost my king." Her voice was a growl, low and dangerous, but instead of being cowed, Alistair stared her down with flaring anger. He didn't let go of her and he glared even as he rubbed at his poorly-shaven jaw with his free hand.

Her upper lip curled and twitched in a half-snarl. "Now let me go or I swear I will break every bone in your body and-"

"And leave me for dead, too?"

She tried to strike him again, but this time he caught her wrist and, with a tug, he dragged her from the main bar of the tavern and into a darkened corner, out of the way and without audience. He leaned close, breath hot against her cheek. "Is that what you would do? Killing kings is such a hobby of yours."

"You don't understand," she bit out. "We did what we had to do-"

" _You betrayed your king and country_."

She flinched at the words as much as the pain behind them.

"Elissa should have killed you when she had the chance," he added. "Should have made you beg for mercy and forgiveness at our feet. And then you should have joined your _Blighted master_ in an unmarked pit somewhere, and maybe then Cailan could have had his justice. Maybe _Duncan_ could have had his justice."

He let go of her, running both his hands through his hair.

"Get out," he said, but he didn't turn away, watching her through sunken, shadowed eyes.

She remembered an Alistair, though she had barely met him, who was bashful and good-natured and a little overwhelmed by everything. At Ostagar, when he'd been sent on an errand purely devised to bother her, he hadn't known what to do with finding her polishing her armor, naked to the waist except for her breast band. He had stammered and blushed and apologized, and she had known then that, on some level, he was an innocent.

That was the one detail she had remembered when the news had come that he and the Warden had survived- his innocence, and how could one so innocent defeat a Blight or overturn a nation? But he had been something else by the Landsmeet, and he was something else now, sullied and broken and jagged at the edges.

And he was also Alistair Theirin, the last piece of Ferelden in all of Ostwick that mattered, and under the weight of his accusations, she bowed her head. She made her decision and bit down on her anger, her wounded pride.

"No," she said. "I won't go."

Alistair's brow furrowed. "What do you want of me?" he asked, and she could hear the pain there still, the distrust, the anger. "You killed good men. You killed my half-brother. You almost killed a nation and you come crawling before me to offer me coin- for what?

"To see me destroyed? Is that what your Queen-master sent you to do? You're her loyal dog, aren't you?" He laughed then, a bitter, dark, nearly exhausted thing that sounded as if worms were eating at it whole. It was two years after Ostagar, and the shame of that day festered in her soul just as surely as the outrage of it festered in his. His words could only strengthen her resolve.

"I will serve," she said, enunciating each word exactly, carefully, through gritted teeth.

Here was the last of the Theirin bloodline, wasting away, and here she was, the dedicated servant of a country that no longer wanted her. He was her country. He was her Ferelden, and in that moment, she wanted to fire his rage again. She wanted to give him her guilt and let him twist it. She had never knelt before Loghain and given him service the way Alistair accused her of, but the rest was right.

She had killed a king.

She watched as he circled her. The way he moved spoke of too much drink and too much intensity. He was trying to prowl. He was trying to intimidate. It didn't work, but she let him get behind her and wasn't surprised when she heard his footsteps approaching.

His hands hesitated just a moment before settling on her, just enough for her to see them coming and to stay still. He pulled her hard back against him, one arm against her throat, the other around her waist pinning her arms to her sides. "You want to serve me?" he asked, voice uneven and beginning to crack. "You want _this_? Tainted and exiled and _abandoned_ -" His hand rose from her side to grab roughly at one of her breasts, even as he caught her ear between his teeth and bit hard.

He reeked of alcohol and sweat and stale piss, probably his, and once upon a time she had been a woman with standards. She had required only that her partners did not know her and would not learn who she was, and that they were strong and not interested in anything beyond a single night. She'd idolized a man, a legend, from before she reached her sixteenth name day, a hero who was everything the stories about him claimed.

Alistair was not that man. Alistair was a failed man, a crashing drunk, and his every touch hurt her. And yet she responded to him out of guilt and loneliness and some deep need.

"Yes," she said and arched back against him.

The back of the tavern where they stood was shadowed and quiet and she thanked the Maker for that small amount of privacy as Alistair pushed her down over a table. She pressed her cheek to the stained and sticky wood, grunting at the weight of his body flush against her. She could have thrown him, could have twisted and rolled them, could have maybe won a match of fists and feet even if he had been at full strength. He wasn't. She could have unbalanced him with a single move.

She chose not to.

His hands ran roughly down her sides as he breathed heavily against her ear. When his fingers found the waistband of her leggings and followed it around to where it was laced, he whispered, low and harsh, "Are you going to stop me?"

It was an earnest, aching question and she felt her cheeks burn at it. She didn't look back at him and instead answered by lifting her hips, allowing him to tug down her leggings and her smalls beneath. He exhaled sharply, fingers skidding along her bared thighs once everything was bunched around her knees where her boots and his reach stopped his push.

"You want this," he whispered, his voice almost wondering, and his lips trailed hot along the back of her neck. "You _want_ this-" and then his fingers dipped between her legs, parting her for him, and he hissed when he felt her heat, how she was already growing wet for him.

Cauthrien's head spun with drink, with the warmth of him, with the insistent press of his clothed erection against her. She wanted to take his anger, wanted to receive it. He hated her and every reason was true and legitimate. She could feel it in the tension of his arms, the clench of his hands where he gripped her.

She was willing and ready to lose herself in this, to debase herself before a leader who wasn't her leader.

She'd sunk to drink and blood money in her exile; what was this in addition to it? The man behind her wasn't some nameless stranger like she'd given herself up to at home. No, he was Ferelden, or could have been, and where Ferelden had been Loghain's mistress, it was her master.

When Alistair pulled away, she growled in frustration, but it was only a few inches so that he could undo the fasteners on his own pants, could pull himself free and push against her entrance. She groaned then, arching her back and pressing towards him like a beast in heat.

 _Dog lord bitch_ , they called her here. She could play the part.

He grabbed her, one hand on her shoulder, one on her hip, and pulled her back sharply against him, filling her in one motion. She cried out and his hand on her shoulder went to cover her mouth, pulling her head back and forcing her to push up on her elbows and curve her spine still further for him.

His fingers on her hip scrabbled for purchase. They shifted constantly, as if he were unsure of where he wanted to touch. He finally focused only on driving into her, the table groaning and sliding across the floor with each thrust.

While his hands couldn't move, his lips did, finding the lobe of her ear, the nape of her neck, the juncture of throat and jaw. He kissed and he bit and she whimpered and squirmed, and when he whispered filthy threats and jibes in her ear, when he called her _whore_ and _fallen_ and _his_ , when she heard the faintest tremor in his voice, she bucked and drove him deeper still until the words were lost and he was only grunting and groaning meaningless cries.

He was a wasted beggar king, but she could feel the flex of his muscles against her, around her as he held her taut. His hand on her hip moved only to nudge her legs further apart so that he could bear her down still more. His breathing was broken and so was hers; she rutted back against him, needing him, shuddering with the force of it. Her knuckles were white from clawing and gripping at the sides of the table.

Distantly, she heard the sounds of laughter, of cheering, of comments that had the words _whore_ and _doesn't dress like one but look at her move_ in them. The corner they were in was dark and quiet but even with his hand muffling her cries, they were loud enough to draw attention.

She groaned and trembled at the knowledge, and Alistair sped up, hips snapping. He was relentless. He was unyielding. The alcohol in his system didn't seem to do anything but prolong his thrusts, his needy grabbing, his nips at her skin. She took it, and when he shifted to push her hard against the table again, pulling her hips up and thrusting down into her, she cried out _Alistair_ and _Ferelden_ against his hand and lost herself.

She was aware of his increasing fervor, of his final stop deep inside of her while he pulsed and spilled into her, but it was hazy and vague. She felt his withdrawal, the sudden rush of too-cool stale tavern air on her exposed sex, and she shivered. But she didn't reach to cover herself.

When she opened her eyes, it was to see Alistair settle in a chair at the table. She closed her eyes again and sagged further against the wood.

There was a thunk by her ear, and when she opened her eyes once more, she saw a copper coin spinning to a lazy halt.

"For Loghain's whore," Alistair muttered, voice low and hoarse, and the loathing she heard she couldn't be sure was directed entirely at her. He'd tucked himself back into his pants and was watching her, eyes fixed on her even as she heard other men shifting behind her, talking, arguing over who should go first or how they should approach her.

She stared back at Alistair, and slowly shook her head as she stood up, all aching center and sore limbs. As she pulled her clothing back into place and pocketed the copper, she corrected,

"Ferelden's whore."

And then she turned and left for her room, staggering and weak, head fogged and eyes half-glazed. One man reached out for her, but a single glare drove him back.

She locked the door behind her.

  
**\--**   


She could have taken a room in a different tavern. There were others in Ostwick, many just as cheap and run down as the one she was in, but she didn't leave.

Alistair didn't, either, coming every night just as before, drinking his fill, and then staggering out or falling unconscious near the bar.

She avoided him at first, refusing to look at him for more than a glance, acting as if nothing had happened, as if the table over in the corner wasn't still out of place from their rutting, as if the other patrons didn't still make low comments when they thought she couldn't hear.

But their last exchange still echoed, and at night she would sit on the edge of her narrow bed and finger the coin he'd given her. It was Fereldan, something unexpected. It wasn't from a Marcher mint or from Orlais or even Antiva.

It was from home.

 _Ferelden's whore_.

She'd meant it to remind him what she served, what ideals. It had been the same, then, as Loghain calling Ferelden his mistress, his wife. She had meant to turn his words, his insults, back against him, the same way she'd taken his anger and transformed it with her body into something violent but enjoyable.

She had hoped it would shock him out of whatever spiral he was in.

But it didn't. He sat and drank, and she sat and drank, and neither of them changed, except that she could remember the feel of his body against and inside of her, the words _Ferelden's whore_ a constant echo.

He was Ferelden.

She came to a decision a full week later, and after two crashing drinks of whisky to steel herself and to still the continuing ache in her heart of being so far from home, she walked up to him where he sat at the bar once more. She stood next to him, resting her folded arms on the wood.

"Why are you still here?" he asked after a moment, voice uncertain and rough. He looked to her, frowning. "Come to put a knife in my back? Turn me in to the city guard?"

"No," Cauthrien said. "If I wanted to do any of that, it would already be done." She didn't say that there was nothing to turn him in for. She had told him she would serve, and when he had made his intentions - even if they had only been to scare her away - clear, she had told him yes.

"Then what? Come to laugh at me?"

"No," she repeated, then drew herself back up. "If you want me, my room is the fourth door on the left upstairs. Knock three times and bring a copper."

  
**\--**   


Two days passed and she began to doubt that he would come. She wondered if he had misunderstood her- or maybe he still had too much pride. Was it possible, she wondered, that he would let others use his body for a silver but wouldn't touch hers for a copper? He watched her, when they sat at their accustomed spots and drank, but he did nothing more than that.

Until she returned to her room on the second night and not five minutes later she heard a carefully counted rap of knuckles on wood.

She hesitated before going to the door. Her doubt and frustration turned to uncertainty. To theorize it, to conceive of it, had been easy. But to carry it out- she had had lovers in the past, but never like this. Never for a copper, never a man who hated her, never with the certainty of service.

She went to the door.

He was drunk. She could smell it before he even exhaled, could see it in the sway of his shoulders. She took a step back, and he matched it with one of his own. They were of a height but he was broader, even wasting away as he was, and his eyes were fixed on hers. She took another step.

He followed again and shut the door behind him.

And then the dance faltered. She swallowed and he glanced away, and she asked, "Where do we begin?"

He shrugged, exhaling a frustrated little sigh of a noise. He dug into his pocket, and pulled out a coin. "A copper, you said?"

"Yes."

Just a symbolic gesture and he nodded, slowly, slipping it back in. She didn't hear the click of it against other coins and it made her uneasy on his behalf; when he looked to her, he seemed to see it. But instead of reassuring her, apologizing, or retreating, he walked to her.

And then he passed her and went over to the bed. Over his shoulder, he said simply,

"Strip."

He sat on the edge of the mattress then, his eyes fixing on her, and in his expression she saw no expectant lechery. What she saw instead was muted anger, hatred, and a deep need. It called to something in her, a lingering resentment and a desperate loneliness and unshakeable homesickness.

Her hands went to the laces of her leggings.

There was no show in it. There was only the efficient shedding of clothing: boots, leather pants, socks, smalls, tunic, breast band. On the last only did his eyes widen slightly and his cheeks color. She could see him beginning to strain against his breeches, but he did not move to free himself until she stood completely nude before him, all muscle and broad shoulders and thick waist, full breasts and fuller hips.

It was only then that his hands went towards his own laces, but then he stopped. He stood up and stepped away from the bed, and then jerked his head towards it, peering at her from sunken eyes.

"Kneel. On the bed."

It was hard, following the man's orders, but she had done it once already. This was what he was paying her for, what she was offering to him. She would serve. And so she climbed onto the bed, crawled forward to the center of it, and knelt on her hands and knees with her feet towards him, eyes fixed on the wall before her.

The mattress sank as his weight was added to it, the straw compressing. She could feel his warmth. His shirt was still on, and when he reached out to touch her, hands almost gentle against her back, she felt the fabric of the cuffs against her skin. He came to kneel between her legs and she felt the hem of it tickle against the backs of her thighs before he hiked it up.

His hands explored. His fingers skimmed over her skin and she shivered. She could feel his eyes on her, on the line of her spine, on the muscles of her shoulders, the bruise along her side from where she had been struck the day before on a job.

His touches were too kind, and she tensed. Her mind raced. This was not the anger she had seen in his eyes before, felt in his touches. It wasn't what she had asked for. It wasn't what she wanted.

She tried to open her mouth to speak, her thoughts jumbled and aching to be said: _I killed hundreds. Thousands. I burned their fields, I took their brothers and sons and turned them into soldiers to die on the wheel of Loghain's ambition-_

What came out was an order of her own, a request, a strangled, " _Hurt me_."

He obliged. His hand found the back of her neck and with the heel of his hand he pushed. She let him bow her head to the mattress, inhaled in a strangled, grateful gasp as his fingers, soft, no longer calloused, wrapped around her throat. When she tried to lower her body as well, he tightened his grip while his other hand found her hips, slid under them to her belly, and lifted up. She was forced to brace herself on her arms bent at the elbows just by her jaw and to press her cheek against the hard, uneven straw mattress while he exposed her.

Her fingers curled into the thin sheet as he prodded without guidance at her sex. He was hard; she had seen it and could feel it now, could feel him straining not to simply push forward without a target. His hand, which had loosened somewhat at the first testing push, tightened again as he found her entrance.

One harsh thrust and he was buried in her. She jerked instinctively, tried to lift her head and lower her hips. He didn't let her, pushing her down. She gasped for breath under the weight of him and found little, the mattress depressed enough by his force that she couldn't quite breathe through it.

_Maker preserve me._

He wasn't gentle. It was no different from the first time, each thrust an attack as if he were seeking vengeance or lashing out at she who had hurt him- at what she stood for that had hurt him. And yet it wasn't pain, not exactly. His hand on her throat, cutting off her air and pinning her down, that hurt and made her begin to panic, made her buck and thrash. And yet it still wasn't pain.

Not exactly.

Or, if it was pain, it was pain she could handle and pain she could accept, pain that only drove her forward, throbs of aching pleasure spiralling up her spine and belly and down her trembling, tensed thighs.

The weak moan that came from her throat only proved it and earned a broken laugh in return from the man bent over and around her, pounding into her.

She lost track of where one thrust ended and another began. Her head spun and her cries were only half-made, muffled by the sheet and the mattress and his hand forced hard enough against her throat to leave bruises. There was a moment where she felt sure he was about to press too hard, but then he leaned back to find another angle and she gasped for breath.

They danced for what seemed like an eternity to her fogged mind.

Where were her survival instincts? Where was her soldier's spirit, that would fight to the end to protect her life and country? Gone, it seemed, under that same country's insistent pressure.

She began to laugh even as she felt hot tears slip unbidden from her eyes, even as she focused more and more on the relentless force and pleasure echoing through her body. She enjoyed it, and the memory made her feel giddy and sick all at once.

Alistair let out a low growl and pulled from her, hands leaving her body. She heard herself whine, felt herself grind back against him, lifting up off of her knees to try and take him back into her. He placed a hand on the small of her back and pushed down again with that inexorable force, and she was left gasping for air and obeying. She heard the slide of hand on flesh, once, twice, and then he groaned. She felt the hot spatter of semen across her hips and back, and she sagged into the mattress, cheeks flaming.

"I won't give you a Theirin heir," he gasped after a silence of too many hundreds of heartbeats.

The mattress sunk and rose again as he pushed himself off of it. She turned her head to watch him. He dressed without looking at her, walked to the table beside the bed without a glance, and left a single copper coin.

She watched as he left the room and shut the door tight behind him.

And then, her lungs still burning and her skin tightening as his seed dried thick along her back, she pushed up onto her knees and slipped a hand between her thighs to finish what he had started.

  
**\--**   


The next night, when she walked into the tavern after a long day of sweat and blood and steel, he was already sitting at the bar. Without a word, she approached him and left two more sovereigns by his hand.

He looked at her with a wordless frown and a furrowed brow.

She said nothing and walked away to her usual table. He didn't follow.

  
**\--**   


He stopped selling his body.

He no longer left the tavern with men and he no long arrived with a reddened mouth and hair mussed from gripping fingertips. She watched and noted it with approval. He owed her only coppers for anything he would want to do to her, but she owed him gold, the support of a loyal subject to keep him from debasement.

She waited for questions. He never approached her, however, keeping his distance as days passed, as a week passed. She wondered if he would ever come to her again, or if the two Fereldan coppers she now kept with her at all times were the only ones she would ever earn. Left to satisfy herself with the small change in him, she focused on that to the exclusion of all else. The memory of his hands on her, the sound of his voice commanding, the pain of leaving home, the shame of her failure of her country- all of that was pushed aside firmly, viciously.

What mattered was that his lips, at least, were not abused.

After another night of silent watching, she slowly ascended the stairs to her room. Her back itched, as it often did, with the memory of his seed drying on her skin. Later, as she'd cleaned it off with a torn rag, leaning against the basin, she'd realized what he had meant. _I will not give you a Theirin heir_ spoke of paranoia, a paranoia she could well understand.

It reminded her of Anora.

But Alistair's fears were more personal. A child of his, if given to the Crown, could be used to legitimize Anora in a way that nothing else could. That, at least, he remembered. And he remembered too that she was a loyal servant of Ferelden. What he didn't understand was what that had come to mean.

She was touching absently at the curve of her spine when she heard footsteps behind her. They were light but firm and she bit down the urge to turn around. It could have been anybody. It could have been another patron of the tavern, a cutpurse, an assassin.

But she knew who it was.

She offered him a closed door, and he knocked three times.

  
**\--**   


She felt numb.

The only time she could feel anything was when Alistair Theirin had his Maker-damned hands on her or inside of her, when she arched back against him and he held her down, when they played their game of whore and client even though the pay was minimal and she never would have rejected him.

But the pattern of feeling and not feeling was preferable to what had gone before and even Cauthrien could see it. She drank less, if only by a cup or two of whisky a night, and she took less joy in the wanton slaughter of designated enemies - not that she had taken much before. She came alive only when she slipped coin into Alistair's hand or she heard his knock at her door or afterwards slid her finger over a familiar imprint of burnished and tarnished red-brown metal.

Ferelden called her home night after night.

He did not come every night. A week or more could pass between visits. But he always returned and he always took her with her back to him. Sometimes he bent her over the little table that could barely support her weight but held her slowly accumulating pile of Fereldan coppers. Sometimes he held her against the wall. Sometimes he stretched out on her bed and let her mount him, and it was those times that she felt the most lewd, the most debased, the most like she was truly playing the role of whore.

But they stopped speaking the word aloud .

She learned, too, that he was not at ease. When he gripped her hard enough to bruise, that was genuine; but when he found words of insult, those were forced. His voice wavered each time. She never mentioned it, instead drinking in the reiteration of their roles. That ratification of their arrangement that allowed them to come together in her tiny tavern room was necessary. It was good.

He was broken and so was she. It was impossible to ignore. His hands gripped hard not only out of anger and distrust but also out of need. Her body and mind warmed to him quickly out of loneliness. He, who had been forced to drag himself along the bottom of society, craved the power she offered him. She, who had lost her ideals and the order of her life, clung to the structure he offered her.

He left after every meeting as quickly as he could. Sometimes, he stayed away or avoided her gaze for days afterwards, and she could only read shame in the set of his shoulders. But one night, after he knelt on her bed and held her back tight to his chest and guided her up and down along his length, when afterwards she sprawled out over her thin mattress, he settled down next to her.

He stayed until sleep found them both and rescued them from the awkward silence of two people who had everything and nothing to say to one another.

  
**\--**   


She woke up to the sound of ragged breathing.

He was still in her bed, facing her, curled around himself. His expression was tight and drawn, pained, and his breathing, she realized, was made of muffled cries. His fingers twitched and clawed at the sheets.

She watched.

Nightmares. She knew them well, old friends from Ostagar and after, and she saw looking at him with his sweat-slicked, sallow brow that same panic, the same fear. Perhaps his nightmare were not about that night. Perhaps they were about other things, worse things. Perhaps they were something she couldn't understand.

She didn't know.

She didn't know, either, if she should wake him; she hadn't asked him to stay, but she had not sent him away, either. He didn't reach for her. But when she stretched out a hand and laid it lightly on his shoulder, his breathing eased.

And so she watched, quiet and uncertain and exhausted, until Alistair opened his eyes.

He looked at her blearily and reached for her. She eyed his searching hand, then turned away. She could not face him still, did not want to, but she shifted closer.

He draped an arm over and pulled her naked body flush to his, burying his face against the nape of her neck. His breathing was still rough and pained, and his hand did not grope for a breast or the spot between her legs. It rested instead on her sternum, holding her close. His exhales began to even, his inhales to slow. He pressed his lips to her shoulder.

It was only then that his hand slipped down. She could feel his stirring erection against her rear and she moved to rise onto her knees, but again he held her fast. He exhaled a quiet _shh_ before his hand slid along her thigh, then shifted her just enough so that he could rock against her. His fingers dipped between her legs and he guided himself, pressing into her with a soft sigh.

He remained curled around her, and she shuddered at the firm, tight feel of him pushing inside of her, rocking and opening her to him. She expected a rough bite at her ear, at her shoulder, but he only kissed her, only exhaled shakily. His hand settled back over her belly.

She could feel herself where he thrust, his hips rolling harder and faster.

Cauthrien let out her first whimper, arching, as he canted his hips and struck deep inside of her. She never stopped wanting this, the harsh press of him, the girth of him, his muscles against her back, his arms encircling and trapping her no matter her embarrassment. Her own fingers slipped down to trail over his hand and delve into her curls, shameless and wanton, and she cried out and bucked back against him.

He didn't say anything, didn't mock or tease or even encourage her, but he did groan and increase his own pace. She didn't know this position, had never felt it, but he found mobility in it easily and drove into her harder. He lifted her top leg up, pulling it over his, spreading her to the cool night air and to his increasingly fervent pounding. Her head arched back. She felt his lips by his ear.

She gasped his name- gasped _Ferelden_ soon after, body tensing. She wanted _more_. She bucked and her fingers were replaced by his, rubbing in small circles and pinching.

She turned her head towards his on instinct, on impulse.

He kissed her.

His lips sealed over hers to catch her cries and she felt herself come apart, shuddering and whimpering and bucking against him again and again, writhing in the warm prison of his arms. He held her fast, and she felt him stop moving buried to the hilt in her, pulling her hips back against his, rocking and gasping with the force of his own orgasm. For the first time in weeks, he did not spill on her skin or the floor or her sheets.

When he did pull out, he didn't move far from her, instead keeping her close and tucking his forehead against her neck, his hips against hers. He was warm, and she didn't protest.

  
**\--**   


In the morning, there were two coins for her on the table. One was their accustomed copper.

The other was a silver.

  
**\--**   


 

There was a change in Alistair. She could see it in the way he drank - less and more slowly, his desperation slowly fading. She could see it in the way he didn't sit in the tavern from late afternoon until nearly early dawn. He wasn't there as often, and when he did return, it was with straighter shoulders and, eventually, finer clothing.

It was nothing special, merely coarse wool and some unevenly spun and woven linen, but it wasn't piss-stained and it wasn't threadbare.

The pride she felt at that cut through the numbness.

She didn't know if it was the coin she still slipped him or if he had found some other way to afford his new kindnesses, but as the days went on, she never saw his lips reddened except from being pressed hard against her shoulder, his eyes rarely glazed from drink.

He came to her more frequently, more regularly, a copper in hand each time. He didn't kiss her again but his touches became less forceful by degrees. The whispered, pained jibes she was used to faded away to be replaced by the sound of his guard falling when he came, muffling a broken moan against her back, against her hair as he shot onto the bed beneath them or her thigh or her hips. He would hold her tightly after it, for just a minute, two, uncaring of the mess, and then he would leave without a word.

He looked vaguely sad when he left his copper on the table each time.

  
**\--**   


He uncurled himself from around her, swinging his legs over the side of the mattress and running his hands through his hair. A few passes later, he dropped his hands to his knees, looking down at them. They had the lightest of callouses these days, and they seemed to be rougher, firmer each time he visited. In the dim light of the single candle burning in the room, she thought she saw blisters and raw spots.

She recognized those marks, along with the bruises spidered along his knuckles and arms, spreading over his ribs. He was fighting with padding or armor and forgiving weapons.

Cauthrien looked away to her own weapons; she had let her practice fall off, her only exercise the killing and guarding of men for pay and no allegiance beyond an afternoon. Was he doing the same? She hadn't heard of him in the circles she traveled in, but she didn't pay the words of the other mercenaries much mind.

She wasn't expecting him to speak again, waiting instead for the clink of coin on wood, but the straw of her mattress never shifted to signal his standing. Instead, she was met with the sound of a frustrated, harsh exhale.

"I'm sick of all of these games."

She looked over to him with a frown and a question etched on her face. He was still sitting on the edge of her bed, but instead of staring at his hands, he was watching her. She pulled herself from the mattress, standing and putting distance between them.

"Tell me," he continued after she said nothing, "what this is. Why you're doing this. This is some plot of Anora's, isn't it? Of Eamon's? It's one of them. It's always one of them."

"There is no plot," she said, biting down on the sudden impulse to call him _sire_ as she crouched to retrieve her smalls.

"What do you mean, _no plot_?"

"Exactly what I said." She pulled up the rough, worn linen, ignoring the frayed edges, the spots where the material was wearing thin.

"You're not doing this because you want to," he said, and his voice was warped with bitterness.

She turned to him, crossing her arms over her naked chest. She hadn't opposed him since the night she first confronted him. It had been all deference and stoic obedience after that. But the accusation and loathing in his voice- she could not bear it.

"I'm not?" she challenged him.

Slowly, his brow still furrowed, Alistair rose from the mattress. It was his turn to look away as he dressed and she watched him closely all through it, waiting for a response or a dismissal or an angry retort. But he seemed more exhausted than anything else, and was silent.

Finally, though, as he tugged his boots on, he looked up to her.

"... You're better than this."

"Better than serving my country?"

"That isn't what this is," he said, taking a step towards her as if without thought, shaking his head. "You know that. You aren't stupid. I- at Ostagar, before the battle, I saw you. And Loghain wouldn't have relied on somebody without a brain. Without a conscience or common decency, yes, but-"

"This is how I am choosing to serve my country," she interrupted, and her firm expression was met by a scowl from him before he looked away once more.

"I can't do it any other way," she continued, "but I want to do it like this."

Her voice trembled with the admission and his gaze snapped back to hers. His fingers curled at his sides, then splayed against his thighs. She watched as his lips parted, as he tried to speak- but instead he crossed the space between them.

His advance made her retreat. Months ago, she would have stood her ground against any man who pressed forward to challenge her, but with Alistair, as always, she yielded. Or perhaps it wasn't yielding- perhaps it was a resistance, a challenge of her own for him to pursue. He answered it in kind with another step, another, until she felt the wall just behind her.

She squared her shoulders and set her jaw. She stared him down.

They were rarely face to face. Even their brief conversations were held with one of them turned away, offering a flank or a back, with little eye contact and even less intimacy. Now, though, she could feel his breath hot against his cheek.

She didn't smell nearly as much alcohol as had been there every night before.

"You want this?" he questioned, and she remembered the last time he asked her, just as disbelieving but more bitter by half. She swallowed, canting her head slightly.

"Yes," she said.

With a noise somewhere between a growl and a hitched sob, he surged forward the last few inches between them. He bowed his head, lips finding her bared collarbone as his hands pressed to the wall on either side of her head. She flexed her fingers at her side, unsure of where to touch, suddenly unused to everything between them. She exhaled shakily and bared her throat to him, and he kissed his way up.

He had kissed her skin countless times before, but being chest to chest with him changed it. She leaned heavily back against the wall and hesitantly slid her hands over his shoulders. She could feel him tremble as he kissed higher, tilting her chin up with a light nudge, lips finding the corner of her jaw, the lobe of her ear.

He was going to kiss her again. He was going to kiss her again, and Maker, she didn't know what she would do, but she lowered her chin enough to invite him, heart pounding, and-

And he kissed the corner of her mouth lightly before drawing away. He watched her until he found the door, and then he left, no coin on the table to commemorate his passing, nothing except the tightening flutter in her stomach that refused to quiet.

  
**\--**   


She saw him next on the streets of Ostwick. It was a rare occurrence. She had seen him before, sitting in the shadow of a building, once or twice filching a shirt or food from a market stall. But that had been weeks ago, when his fingers still twitched near-constantly, when he still hadn't given up his source of income.

When she saw him, she froze where she stood.

He looked tired in the light of day. That had not changed. She thought of his nightmares, his uneasy sleep - and the solace he had seemed to take in her arms. His eyes were still sunken, that she knew, his face thinner than it should have been, but he had been recovering. His hair looked freshly cut, his beard cleanly shaven off. He had bathed recently.

And he was wearing the armor of the city guard.

It wasn't new issue; the metal was dented, the straps worn, the spaulders not quite long enough for his arms. But it was polished to gleaming and he wore it with what looked like pride, hesitant though it seemed to be in the awkward way he would look to the market stalls where once he had been a grubbing thief.

He was new to the guard, wearing hand-me-down armor, but Maker's mercy, he was _in the guard_.

She leaned heavily against the building she was waiting outside, a little house with yellow paint on the underside of its ramshackle gables and nothing else remarkable about it except that it housed the list of jobs on offer to hired swords. She wished she had a thief's ability to go unnoticed in the scant shadows afforded by the bright midday sun, but she settled on looking away from the object of her nerves. She leaned against the wall as if she were holding in place, a piece of lumber or an unremarkable post.

It didn't work.

She heard him long before she looked to him, booted feet on packed soil soft but unmistakable. Miserable little Ostwick had very few paved thoroughfares compared to many of the other cities she had passed through and she tried to focus on that instead of the way Alistair was looking at her: confused, curious, and just a little it angry.

"Are you watching me?" he asked when he was close enough that she could hear his low whisper.

She shook her head. "I didn't know you were in the guard until a few minutes ago."

It was strange, being close to him where the sun could fall full on their heads. Cauthrien foundered, unable to straighten in her mind how to interact with him. Months of being in close quarters alone, with only a single purpose, skewed her thoughts and she felt her cheeks burning. She looked away, crossing her arms over her chest.

He was in armor and she wasn't. It was a strange turnabout, one that she wasn't sure she liked. But when he reached out to touch her wrist, it was done gingerly, uncertainly.

"... Yes, I'm in the guard," he said as he let his hand fall back to his side.

"How long?"

"A week. Eight or nine days. Something like that."

"Ah."

And what was there to talk about? They never spoke, not really, and idle conversation was strained and full of things gone unspoken for too long to speak of again. She pressed her lips together and returned her gaze to him.

His brow was furrowed in thought.

"... So I don't need you," he began again, and her heart nearly dropped from her chest until he continued, "to bring me coin anymore. It won't be necessary. Tell Eamon or whoever is funding you that it's fine now."

"Nobody is funding me, Alistair."

His name left her lips before she could stop it. She had never spoken it except in passion, but they had also never looked at each other in the light of day and scrambled for words. She nearly turned away then, but instead took a deep breath and straightened up, pushing away from the wall.

"The coin you get comes from the jobs I've been taking."

"You can't be making much," he countered, and she canted her head at the thread of concerned frustration in his voice.

"More than you were. And I only needed to pay for that room. Food."

"Drink."

"Yes," she conceded with a minute shrug. "A trip to the herbalist after you've visited."

He looked away, lips parting, tongue peeking out to wet them, throat moving as if he wanted to say something. Nothing came out.

Cauthrien shook her head. "There are no plots. I am not under orders to sustain you, to kill you, to get an heir from you. I'm just... here. My orders I give myself."

"And take from me," he whispered, pressing a hand to his forehead. "Maker."

"I chose this. Now, I have work to do, and-"

"Mercenary work."

She hesitated, half-turned from him. "Yes."

"You're not _built_ for mercenary work," he protested, and there was that concern again, couched in anger, in irritation. He sounded like he wanted to grab her by the shoulder, shake her. But he didn't touch her. "You're- you follow ideals. And leaders. You don't-"

"But it is what I have. I make due."

"And what about the guard? They would take you. They took _me_ , after all. Hadn't held a sword in almost a year and half the men there knew me even if they didn't _know_ me, and they still took me."

"No. This isn't my home. The guard- it would only be more mercenary work, just a different flavor." She shook her head again. "Do not concern yourself."

That, too, provoked that furrowing of his brow, that inability to speak for a moment. "I," he tried, but failed to continue, and finally he stepped away from her, back into the street proper. He took a deep breath. "... I have patrol tonight," he said, finally. "... I won't see you until tomorrow night."

"Tomorrow night," she confirmed, and was met by a tight smile that quickly turned bashful. He even toed at the ground.

"Tomorrow night."

And then he cut her a salute and she watched as he returned to the main square. Her eyes followed him until she lost the glinting of his armor in the throngs of people. It was only then that she found the will to move and slipped into the house, looking for more work and trying not to think ahead to the following night.

  
**\--**   


"This isn't who I am."

It was the same moment as always, him sitting naked on the edge of her thin mattress, not looking at her. He usually didn't speak, but tonight his voice didn't surprise her. Something had changed in his recovery. When she had told him _tomorrow night_ , she had known then that she was inviting this - this different Alistair, this healing Alistair, this frustrated but coherent Alistair who, though he looked the same, was slowly shifting into something she remembered from Ostagar a lifetime ago.

She remained curled on her side, watching him, her legs sliding over one another. There had been only a few sentences exchanged on either side, both equally uncertain as they navigated again their positions towards one another, but he had been clear in one thing: he wanted to be with her the way he had been when he awoke from his nightmares. His kisses were still cooling in the evening air, even as fetid and cramped as it was in her little room, and her skin burned with the memory of the heat of him.

"What do you mean?" she asked when he didn't continue or stand or look to her.

"Doing this to you. Asking this of you. It isn't who I am. Maker, when I left Ferelden, I had never even- but here I am, somehow." He turned his head to see her then, his eyes averted from her nudity and focused somewhere just beyond her left ear. "Doing this."

She was silent a long moment before she shrugged. "I don't mind."

"But you should." His words sounded strangled and he pushed his blistered and callousing hands against his forehead. "I didn't mean it. What I said that night. When I called you Loghain's whore, I didn't mean it. Not... not like this."

She pushed herself up, then, and his eyes followed the movement. "And when I tell you I want this? If I tell you I enjoy it?" Her own words caught, but she forced them out. "If I say I don't want it to stop?"

She had realized, in the day since she saw him in the square, when she had thought for a moment that he didn't want her anymore and felt her pulse stick in her veins, that she didn't want him to go. She didn't want their strange arrangement to end. It wasn't just a matter of punishment for Ostagar and the civil war anymore, was barely that at all. It was more about the idea of home.

It was more how he held her and made her feel wanted by something both beyond herself and heavily, physically within herself. It was with that thought that she stared him down and waited for his answer, watching his jaw tense and his throat bob as he swallowed.

"Well?" she pushed.

He looked away and rose to his feet. "I don't know what to say to that," he murmured as he began to pull his clothing back on. "Except that you deserve better than coppers."

"I'm not doing this for payment."

"I know. I don't- whatever you're doing it for, I know it's not that." He laced up his pants as he spoke. She didn't move to stop him, instead rising from the bed herself and walking to the washbasin by the small, dingy window.

He had finished inside of her and she had little to clean, but the cold water was a relief against the heat he had left with her.

There came the sound of him pulling his shirt on, and then pulling his boots afterwards, the sound of steady footfalls as he crossed the five steps from the foot of her bed to the small table now covered in small stacks of coins. She had counted them just a few hours before, before his three knocks had come. Eighteen. Eighteen, plus his silver, and in her mind she added the copper he forgot five days earlier when he had nearly kissed her.

The memory was what made her ask, "And how long will it be until I see you again?"

There came no clink of coin on wood. "I have night patrols for the next three days," Alistair said, slowly. "So, at the earliest, in four." He hesitated and she waited. He did not move, or if he did, it was too silent for her to know. "... Will you be here?"

They had made plans the day before but this felt different. The day before, he had told her when he would come - now he asked if he could, and her fingers tightened on the rim of the basin. She shifted her weight, the floorboards beneath her creaking. "As far as I know."

She thought she heard him inhale, but while the room was small, it was not that small. She passed it off as imagination, wishful thinking. He was making plans to come back again. That was what mattered. It was what mattered, beyond the drink or the work or the passing of money between hands: her one connection to home, to people, to herself was going to come back another night.

And maybe he would speak more to her, about something other than worth or deserving, and maybe he would kiss her again. But most importantly she would hear him at her door and open it to him, and they would have their exchange as always: of pleasure, of uncertain pain, of companionship.

Finally, there was a soft _thunk_ against the wood, not coin but something heavier, something she didn't recognize. There were footsteps. They came close one or two steps, then turned around.

"I could buy you a drink first," he offered.

She was down to three drinks a night most nights. But she still drank alone and she drank because there was nothing better to do but wait. The offer of company even there made her head spin, and she bowed her head.

"If you like," she said, voice quiet and more than a little nervous, hope creeping in at the edges as she imagined what it would be like, to sit and speak with him like they were just two people.

"I would," he returned, the words nearly lost in the low murmur coming up from the tavern below. And then he left, his hand sliding rough over the wood of the wall for a moment, the door closing quietly behind him.

On the table, when she finally made it back to her bed, was a small stone, half the size of her palm. It was nothing remarkable in what it was - a river cobble of some sort, smooth and rounded and a deep grey. But the color matched her eyes and its weight was pleasant in her hand. It had a vein of rich red spidering its way through it. And she knew that Alistair had coppers aplenty in his pocket now; it was easy to imagine him seeing the stone on his patrol, bending to pick it up, and thinking-

What?

Of her?

She set it down gently and placed it beside his coppers, his silver, every other sign of payment and acknowledgment and need.

  
**\--**   


Four days later, he bought her a drink. They both nursed tankards of ale instead of cups of whisky and sat the whole while at her usual table. He stumbled over stories of his post. She returned small smiles. She listened. She found she wanted to listen, to hear about his life beyond the walls of her little room, though when he asked about her own work, she shook her head.

"It doesn't need to be talked about."

But he pushed and she gave him at least that she did not use the Summer Sword, though she kept the blade and polished it regularly. He pushed further, and she gave him little stories. She told him about working as a bodyguard, she told him about chasing out raiders. She told him, too, about the job offers she received on occasion from Orlesian nobles. The enticements offered, at least at first, by Tevinter magisters.

"Why don't you take them?"

She shook her head. "They want a status symbol. They want Loghain Mac Tir's- Dragon." It was a nickname she hadn't known about until she had left Ferelden, but for those first months it had been on the lips of too many people. "And they want loyalty."

He frowned. "And you won't give it- because they're Orlesian?"

"Something like that." Cauthrien sat back, and thought to leave it at that - but she owed him more than that these days. More importantly, she wanted him to understand. "It's because they're not what I want to give my allegiance to. I love Ferelden. To give my loyalty to anything else... cheapens that. And I would not give that loyalty with my whole heart."

It was only when he stared back across the table at her that she realized it was likely the longest string of words she had spoken to him in all her time in Ostwick. She had said as much, if not more, outside the Landsmeet chamber, but that had been to Cousland, not to Alistair.

He looked as if he hadn't fully seen her before: a little surprised. Confused. Curious.

He leaned in.

"You really think that way?"

"What way?" She tipped her tankard to her lips to hide her echoing surprise.

"That it's that important. What you give your loyalty to."

"Of course it is." It was hard not to think about Loghain, about how she had shifted her loyalty to a man instead of her country, and from there her thoughts tended to how, now, it was Alistair in place of Loghain. He was the focus of that trust. She frowned and finished the rest of her ale in a long pull.

There was a difference, she told herself as she cradled the tankard in her lap. She could still have served Ferelden during the Blight, but failed to. Here, he was what she had.

"... Cauthrien?"

She looked up at her name, foreign on his lips. "But I've made mistakes in the past," she said, quietly. Loghain had once told her that Ferelden was not the king, was not royal blood, was not the leader beneath the battle standard - it was the people. When had she forgotten that? When had he let her forget it?

Cauthrien stood, setting aside her tankard. She looked down at him, and he gazed up at her.

 _Serving Ferelden_.

That wasn't what this was - not really. She was there for the man before her, not the country behind him. She wanted Alistair to follow her up to her room. The last of the Theirin bloodline could stay down on the tavern floor for all she cared in that moment.

"Come with me?"

  
**\--**   


The latch of the door clicked as he pulled her back against him, arms going around her waist, holding her close enough that she could feel the thudding of his heart against her spine. Her hands rose to touch his arms and she turned her head just enough that she could see him.

His eyes were lowered and she could only make out the line of his lashes, the faint blush on his cheeks. She thought he might speak, might ask what she had meant downstairs, but instead when his lips parted it was to draw a shuddering breath. He splayed his hand over her belly and nuzzled against corner of her jaw.

And then his hands skimmed down and he caught the laces of her leggings with his fingers and began, slowly, to work them loose.

The last time he had helped her undress had also been the first time, when he had asked if she would tell him to stop. She had responded then with motion and now she did again, letting her head fall back against his shoulder, breathing warm against the shell of his ear. She tilted her hips forward when he moved to push the leather down and she thought she felt him laugh.

His hands went then to the toggles of her arming jacket, and when it was worked free she stepped away to shrug out of it, to cast it aside. She turned to face him and though she didn't draw close again, she watched his face as she undressed him in turn. His arms slid over hers as he worked free her tunic, her breast band, while she slipped his smalls over his hips. There was an awkward moment of crouching to undo the laces on her boots, and then she looked up the length of his body to him as she unfastened his. A struggling smile quirked his lips and then she ducked her head with a faint smile of her own. He chuckled, quietly, and then drew her back up to him as he toed off of his boots.

He held her shoulders, thumbs tracing the lines of her muscles, and for a moment, she thought he would kiss her again.

But he didn't. His hands slid down her back and over the bared curve of her ass, gripped there and lifted her. She cursed and reached quickly to grab hold of him as he bore her to the bed, as he spread her out on the mattress and dipped his head to her collarbones, trailing a line of kisses from the hollow of her throat to one nipple.

It was entirely new, the roll of his tongue against her breast, and she arched and gasped and shifted to get away. His hands gripped her hips still, though, and he held her down, teeth grazing her skin and making her hiss out a curse. The tension of his fingers on her was familiar. It grounded her, reminded her that not all of this was unknown, that not all of this was unexpected.

When she stopped trying to escape, he released her hip with one hand and dipped his fingers instead between her thighs. Her breathing stuttered, and she closed her eyes.

His mouth left her breast and kissed back up to her throat, finding a spot and suckling there as he slid a finger into her. His other hand stroked along her waist, her arm, his thumb replacing where his mouth had been to tease at her and make her squirm.

He was so close, and if she just turned her head-

But when she tilted her chin and tried to find his lips in a moment of uncertainty and need, he pulled away from her. She opened her eyes to see his cheeks tinged pink once more, his expression nervous and boyish for all the weariness that was usually in his eyes and the set of his mouth. He licked at his lips and she couldn't look away from it except to roll onto her knees.

Her mouth felt dry, but her body ached for him and she wanted to feel him close again, and so she found the words,

"I want you."

His breath caught as he reached for her. His hands found her waist again and instead of moving to kneel behind her, he drew her towards him. He pulled her into his lap with her back against his chest, her legs splayed over his, his arms around her tight. "Like this," he murmured, pulling her down against him, and she rocked along his length, shivering. "So I can- so that we-"

Alistair didn't finish the sentence, instead pressing his lips to the crook of her neck, but the way he held her, the way his fingers stroked along her arm, along her breast, said enough.

Her hand slipped down to where their hips met and she rose up enough to position him, to situate herself. She could feel him tremble slightly as he held her. He exhaled shakily, his breath hot and tremulous against her skin, and she waited for the tense press of his lips to her to ease before she rolled her hips and worked herself down onto him.

He groaned her name and held her tighter in his arms, rocking his hips up. She shifted in his arms, drawing up and sliding back down, moving at first slowly to find the right angle, the right dance. But when she tried to speed up, he didn't let her. He mumbled her name and kissed his way up to her ear, nipping at the lobe.

"You want this," he breathed in wonder, the sound both the same and different as when he had questioned it that first night. "Maker, Cauthrien," he added in a whispered rush, barely articulate.

She turned her head again, expecting the retreat of before, but found herself breathing, "Yes," against his lips.

Things slowed. One of his hands slid to her hip and held her down against him while his other slid up along her body to touch her jaw, to stroke her hair, to brush his thumb along her lower lip. His eyes searched hers. They were brown, she realized; she had never noticed before, but there was finally a moment to as she parted her lips and the tip of his nose grazed hers.

He kissed her and she came alive.

She reached up to cup his cheek, to hold him close as she let her tongue play along his lower lip. He murmured a needy sound and deepened the kiss, trying to pull her into him with fumbling hands. She tried to turn to him. He urged her off of him and she whined at the loss of him, groaned as he broke the kiss just long enough to lift her.

They tumbled back onto the mattress, him hovering over her, kissing at her lips in quick, desperate movements and then nursing at her lower lip with slow-burning want. She wrapped her arms around him and his hands found her hips, her thighs. He settled between them and pressed into her again, whispering her name.

She whispered his in return, hands sliding over every inch of skin she could reach. Her head spun and she cried out as he began to thrust again, stealing kisses when he pulled away, wet things that echoed the drumming beat inside of her begging for more, for him, for Alistair. She fisted her hands in his hair, drew him back down and then against her, feeling the warmth of him against her chest, the sliding of skin over skin, the intimacy of weight. Her lips found his throat, his shoulder, and she trailed kisses over every inch of skin available to her.

He whispered _Maker_ and _Cauthrien_ and other half-heard words over and over, his arms braced on either side of her. He sank into her with a heat and fervor different from what she had felt from him before, his need tempered by desire instead of vengeance or embarrassment. He reached back with one hand to touch her hip, hold her thigh, and she hooked her leg around him. He drove deeper still and groaned, shuddered, and begged her name.

She arched and moved with him, found his rhythm and kept it, cried out until he muffled her with his lips. He swallowed the sounds she gave him, learned her body all over again as she learned his.

And when he came apart, buried to the hilt inside of her and kissing her fiercely, he curved his back enough to reach between them and rub circles around her nub, bringing her soon after him.

He didn't draw away from her until the heat and weight became too much to bear - and then he only rolled to his side, pulling her with him to continue kissing her, fluttering touches on her lips and chin and nose. His hands grabbed at her, splayed over her skin, found curves he could hold, hollows he could stroke. He didn't let go.

"Alistair," she murmured, and he hummed in response, tilting her chin up to kiss at the expanse of skin along the underside of her jaw.

"No patrol in the morning," he said, voice low and softened by her skin. "Can I- can I stay? Tonight?"

She drew away and he watched her, hands stilling. He looked so young, then, and innocent, and a little nervous.

He looked, for just that moment, how he had looked at Ostagar.

"... Of course," she said, and he shook his head.

"No, not- not because you're my-"

"I'm not," she assured him, though the words surprised even her. They were true and her voice grew firmer as she repeated, "I'm not. That stopped- a long time ago."

"Oh." He tried on a hopeful smile instead, pulling back enough so that she could see it and that he could search her expression. "Then I can stay? Because you want me to?"

She sat up and he followed, hands still on her, settling at her waist. "Yes," she said, after a moment's thought. "Yes. I want you to."

He grinned, an expression both new and old on him, and, she realized, somehow sorely missed. She had missed the memory of it, the idea of it. What he had been before Ostagar- he wasn't that, not really, his eyes still sunken, his hands only slowly regaining callouses. But he was something like it and not like the man she had seen sitting at the bar in miserable little Ostwick drinking away the rest of the world. That grin wasn't the first sign, but it was a bright one, and she felt the same surge of nearly ecstatic pride run through her as he leaned in and kissed her lightly. His hands fell to trail along her thighs, clasp her knees, and then he stood up.

"I have something for you."

Cauthrien glanced to her little side table with its dragon's horde of coins and the polished stone that sat in the middle of it. "Oh?"

He crouched to rummage in his discarded hip belt with its crudely sewn pockets. "Yes. I- I didn't like the idea of bringing you coin. But I made you something. Not for this, but for- well, for this. Do you understand? Please tell me you understand."

Boyish. He was still boyish despite the depths he had fallen to, and she watched him with a faint smile that felt foreign on her lips. She couldn't help it. She had promised to serve him, and even though service fell away in the light of day, in his voice and cautious attempts at interacting, this was what she had really wanted. To make a difference for him. To pull him back up to his feet.

He looked up and caught her smiling, and the tension in his shoulders fell away.

"You understand."

She nodded and he smiled, then stood and came over to the little table. He set something down with less of a clunk than the stone, and when he pulled his hand away, she leaned in to look at it.

It was a little dog carved of wood, the cuts unpracticed but determined. She reached out to pick it up, and as she turned it over in her hands she saw a few incised marks, attempts at curls.

Kaddis.

"A mabari?" she asked, looking up to him, and he nodded.

"Yes. A mabari."

She stroked her thumb over the flank of it, turning it over and looking down to it again. The wood was barely dry and there was a faint spot of rot just at the back left foot. A fallen branch from somewhere in the city? Salvaged building material? She imagined him sitting on his barracks bunk, knife in hand, frowning at the wood as it refused to cooperate, as bits crumbled away until he was left with the form of a dog. He had made this.

For her.

A mabari, a symbol of Ferelden, of loyalty, of strength, and he had made it for her. He settled onto the mattress next to her and touched a tentative hand to the small of her back. She leaned into it, setting the figurine aside and turning back to him.

  
**\--**   


"Ostagar," she said, and he shook his head.

"I don't want to talk about that." He glanced away from her as he handed over a few coppers, receiving in return a piece of bread laden with boiled cockles and mussels drenched in spiced oil. He passed it to her and she picked up one, prying the meat from the shell with a slide of her finger.

"It's not a matter of want," she said, before she ate the morsel and tossed aside the shell onto the small midden beside the fisherman's stall. The cry of gulls was loud, along with the creak of ships, the lapping of waves.

She was not overly fond of the ocean, but Alistair had insisted they meet at the docks for lunch while he was on a break from patrol.

"I don't see why we have to. We haven't yet."

"I need to know what you think about it. About what I did." She ate another, mouth tingling with the heat, and watched him. Every night he had free he had been in her room at the little tavern, had curled up tight with her to sleep. He had suffered nightmares twice more, and she had woken him each time.

Something was growing fast between them, a trust and ease that went beyond their earlier mutual arrangement. Some sort of understanding had been there from the first, a loyalty, a need, but what passed between them now was different.

After all, she was standing on the docks of Ostwick eating fresh-caught shellfish with the sun full on them, where anyone could see.

"I- Cauthrien." He frowned. "We're fine. The two of us, we're fine. Aren't we?"

"Ostagar," she pushed. Two weeks ago, she wouldn't have. She would have thought only that it wasn't her place. Two weeks ago, she wouldn't have asked in the first place. Two weeks ago, it hadn't mattered.

But with the way he kissed her and the way the little wooden mabari felt under her fingers, she needed to know.

"I don't want to talk about it." He tore off a piece of soaked bread and held it to his lips, then stopped. He sighed and looked to her. "I don't like thinking about it. There's just anger there. I think of Ostagar and I think of hearing what had happened. I didn't even get to see it. I couldn't stop it."

"None of us could have stopped it."

"Yes, you could have," he snapped, and then stopped, took a breath, and ate his bread.

She filled the long stretch of silence by eating her lunch, not speaking again until his shoulders had eased.

"No," she said, finally. "Not without losing the whole of the army. We did what we thought was best, was necessary. We were wrong, maybe. I don't know where things started going wrong." Cauthrien looked away at the docks, the roiling expanse of the Waking Sea and, farther out to the east, the Amaranthine Ocean.

Alistair's father had died on that ocean.

The thought didn't help and she looked back to him. He was watching her, mouth set firm. "We never meant for the king to die. But I gave the order."

"Did you?" His lips tightened. "I never know what's true. The stories I heard about you, they were all different. Some said you burned fields, stole the sons and daughters of farmers to fill your ranks. Some of them said you and Loghain-"

"That isn't true. It never was."

Something in him relaxed at that, but only until she spoke again. "But I burned fields. At first we tried not to cripple the people of the Bannorn, but we could not get the banns to stand down. It came to that. I gave those orders."

"Maker, Cauthrien."

"We thought it was necessary."

She tried to pass what was left of the shellfish and bread into his hand, but he let it drop to the ground. He stood unmoving, jaw set, the light on his guard-issue armor glinting too bright to look at for long.

"And Drakon?"

"We thought it was necessary," she repeated, though she flinched at the memory of Alistair, bruised, battered, stripped down before her, Elissa Cousland beside him barely conscious and raging still from the battle before, from the murder of Rendon Howe. She had given the order, then, to take Cousland first; Alistair had been likely to know nothing.

Of course, neither of them had. She understood that now.

Alistair glared and she turned from it. "Drakon, _necessary_. What you did to Elissa- necessary. You say so many things were necessary. Were any of them, really?"

"We were trying to save Ferelden. We failed."

There was a pause, a seemingly endless silence that descended on them, and she felt her pulse lodged in her throat. She waited for the anger to build to what it had been the first night she had seen him. She waited for him to turn away. She had known the risks, but if not now, on the docks of Ostwick, then when? A week hence? A month?

When had she begun to think in months?

But the anger didn't come, not to that same heated point. His jaw worked. He closed his eyes. She watched him suck in deep breaths that made the armor covering him rise and fall with a sliding rattle.

And then he looked to her and nodded. "I believe you - that you thought you were doing the right thing. I believe that. But Maker, the things you did- to a country you claim to love-"

"I know."

He searched her face as if for a sign that she lied, but the guilt still rested squarely in her chest. She waited.

His shoulders sagged. The fight went out of him and he took a step closer, reaching up to brush a gauntleted hand against her cheek.

"... If you had charged, would you be dead?" he asked in a whisper

"Probably," she murmured. "But I would have been glad to die in the service of my country."

He looked away, out to the slow surge and fall of waves, his throat bobbing as he swallowed. "I think I prefer that you're not dead," he confessed finally, "no matter what else that means." When he looked back to her it was with a pained expression that warred with a small, sad smile. His hands slipped to rest on her shoulders then, metal and leather against her plainclothes. "... That's why I didn't want to talk about it."

There was a modicum of guilt, of embarrassment in his face, and she wanted to wipe it away. She wanted to wipe the past away - to have started anew in a tavern bed or on a tavern table in miserable little Ostwick. She hadn't wanted to ask.

But it was done.

"I thought it was necessary," she said, and she waited for some response, nervous and all too sure that he would turn and leave. It was long in coming and she couldn't hold his gaze any longer; but when she looked instead at his shoulders, she saw the metal trembling with wry, quiet laughter.

  
**\--**   


The weight of her sold sword grew heavier with each day. It bowed her shoulders when she came home to her little room on the nights Alistair walked his patrols, knowing that she could instead have been sitting in a mess hall, sleeping in barracks with others, with the resonating rush of continued life. It made her ache when Alistair asked her about her jobs and she could not bear to relate them with any pride or satisfaction. It ate away at her, crushed her down, and each time she went to the little house with the yellow-painted gables, the door seemed harder and harder to move.

And then came the morning when thoughts of shame distracted her, where before had only been calm focus that came from the knowledge of there being nothing else, and she didn't match her blade to her foe's. She slipped. She misstepped. She pushed forward as the raider's shorter, lighter blade came up and she felt the metal bite into the underside of her arm, where only leather guarded against attack.

She had taken worse. Her shoulder had almost been crushed, once, and still ached when the weather was wrong or she carried her armor for too long. Years ago, her leg had been broken. She was covered always in a network of bruises and scrapes.

This wasn't nearly so bad. It bled and it ached and it screamed at her as she cut the raider down, but the muscles were whole; she could lift her sword, could carry her armor, could do all the things she needed to do. And yet when she reached her little room and shed her armor as gingerly as she could, as she peeled away the rough bandage she had tied around her arm, torn from the sea-drenched tunic of a dead man, stinging as it touched her skin, she stared at it.

It was long, perhaps four inches. The edges were clean. There was dirt and salt crusted in it, but she had water. The flesh gaped, but she had a sharp needle, she had tailor's thread.

But she didn't move for a long time.

There came a knock, three quick, familiar raps, and then the door opened, Alistair slipping inside. "Oh good, you're here," he said, and his voice was almost identical to how she remembered him sounding in the days before the battle of Ostagar, cheerful and teasing. She looked up just as he saw her and understood what he was seeing, expression falling. His face even paled.

"An accident," she said, and watched as he frowned, then went over to the wash basin, filled it with water from the pitcher beside it, and brought it to her feet. He knelt in front of her and held out his hands.

"Let me see."

"It's fine," Cauthrien said, but she gave her hand over all the same. His fingers slid up to her elbow and he turned her arm to look at the wound. She bit her lip at the tugging pull of it.

"You usually only have bruises," he said as he reached down with his other hand, pulling his shirt cuff around his fingers and dipping it in the water. He touched the edge of the cut gently, beginning to ease out the debris. "What happened?"

She hissed and he held her tight, immobile. "I- was distracted," she got out through gritted teeth.

He worked the fabric of his cuff up along the cut, touches becoming firmer as he went. "That's not like you- being distracted. You've always been so-" Alistair paused, searching for the word. "... Focused."

She didn't answer, looking down to her hands as he let go of her arm and stood.

"Have you got a needle?" he asked, softly, and she nodded, lifting her uninjured arm to gesture to the corner.

"Wooden box, by the whetstone. There's poultice and bandages, too."

She knew his steps so well, the sound of them, the rhythm. It didn't matter if he was just walking, if he was dragging himself, if he was trying not to wake her - she knew it all. She didn't even need to look at him to know when he hesitated for just a breath on his way back over to her, but she looked up anyway.

"I don't usually get hurt, either."

Alistair blinked rapidly, then canted his head. "What?"

"You said I'm usually focused. I'm also usually not injured." She smiled tightly as he put the box down on the mattress and sat down beside her, one leg folded beneath him so that he could face her. He settled her hand on his far knee, making her twist so he had access to the whole of the wound.

He opened the box and found her needle, already threaded with wax line.

"Is something on your mind?" he asked, pausing with his palm warm on her elbow.

"Just get on with it."

"Right." Alistair laughed, but it was an awkward laugh, and when she glanced over as he positioned the needle near the top of the cut, he was looking only at her arm with his jaw clenched to keep himself from frowning.

As he makes the first stitch, she began to talk.

"It was just the job-" she gritted out, taking a deep breath to steady herself. "I don't know how much longer I can do this."

He paused and she growled at him to continue. He did, but only as he asked, "This?"

"Mercenary work. ... It never gets any easier."

Alistair grunted in understanding, and she looked again to see him still focused only on his work. His fingers, broad and newly calloused as they were, worked nimbly, a combination of no doubt many days spent helping put his companions back together during the Blight and his time in Ostwick before she had met him, when his fingers had itched for coin enough for drink.

He had told her about those days, about what he had done - but now she could tell him that good had come of it.

When he finished the last stitch, tied it in place, and used his boot knife to cut off the stray tail, he bit his lip and then glanced up to her.

"I know I keep saying this, but you should think about the guard. Joining it, I mean. It would be safer, at least."

She stiffened at first, but soon relaxed again as Alistair began smoothing fragrant salve, a luxury from the herbalist, over the wound. "That's not true. Guardsmen are found dead too often."

"But we have healers to see to our wounds. You wouldn't need to do this alone. You said yourself, once, that being in the guard here and being a mercenary were basically the same. But they're not. The guard is safer." He looked at her searchingly, touch gentle and throat bobbing as he swallowed.

"... I'll consider it," she said, softly, and was rewarded by that smile of his. His hands left her arm so that he could cup her cheeks with the palms of his hands, dirtied fingers held away from her skin. He leaned close enough to brush the tip of his nose against hers.

"Thank you," he breathed.

  
**\--**   


Their relationship - because that was what it was, most assuredly, not an arrangement or a transaction or a matter of service to a liege lord - no longer took place only at night or in the awkward full light of day. When he had a spare moment and she was in, he would be there. They talked some days, tangled in bed others. He slipped into brief naps in her company and if his nightmares dared try him in those moments, she would rouse him with kisses.

It was late morning, nearly noon, and he had come by after a long night patrol and morning drills. He hadn't even shed his armor before coming to her, and she had taken it off piece by piece, entranced by the old, familiar movements of helping another with their armor.

He had kissed her and she had sat with him on the edge of the bed. He had worked his fingers against his shoulders, working out the tension and the soreness from her bad shoulder. He knew her body and kissed the nape of her neck to see her shiver. His fingers skimmed along her arm and checked beneath the bandages to see how her arm healed.

She had considered the guard again and again, if she wanted to be there for some of her days, some of her nights, and when he asked her as he always did, she told him, maybe but that she didn't want to give up this space of their own.

It was a miserable little tavern bedroom in miserable little Ostwick, but so much had happened three knocks beyond the closed door that she didn't want to abandon it.

He kissed her shoulder and told her he understood.

It had been a lazy morning, sitting together, stretching out against the sheets twined together, hands roaming and teasing but doing nothing more than that.

But he had patrol by the second bell after noon and he dutifully pulled himself out of bed when the first bell struck. He joked with her as she helped him back into his plate, murmured that he wished he could see her in her armor more often. She smiled back, laughed even.

Before he left, he stopped by her bedside table. The coppers were all still there, along with the one silver, the stone (the color of her eyes, and yes, he had thought of her when he had found it in a gutter halfway outside of town), the mabari, and countless other salvaged and found gifts. He didn't bring one every time and she no longer expected them. Instead, each one left was a token of affection.

He fished in his hip pouch for a moment, gauntlets making his search awkward, but then he pulled his prize free and set it down. At its thunk against the wood, she leaned over to see it.

It was a ring.

She looked up to him with a sharp jerk of her chin. "Alistair?"

"I have a patrol. I'll see you tonight-" he said, avoiding her gaze as he stepped back from the table.

"Alistair."

"I- tonight. Tonight, love."

The word seized her voice in her throat and she stared as he opened the door, as he glanced back with a sheepish smile.

"Love," she repeated, and his smile broadened just before he slipped out into the hall and shut the door behind him.

With trembling fingers she reached out and picked up the ring. It was a simple iron band, uninscribed, unadorned. There were no stones or runes embedded in the metal, nothing to mark it as anything special. It was a washwoman's ring, a tannery boy's attempt at finery.

And it was from Alistair, polished and well-formed and likely purchased instead of found.

She looked back to the door, swallowing, her heart in her throat and her stomach twisting itself into knots and new shapes she didn't have names for.

He loved her?

The words should have made her panic, but the panic didn't come. She thought those three words, thought of his widening smile, his hands on her arm as he bandaged her wounds, the warmth of him beside her in her bed. She thought of cockles on the dockside, a tankard of ale downstairs, the little mabari still standing amidst her stacks of Fereldan coppers.

She didn't know when it had happened. The sensation was foreign, known only through stories and ballads, but she was in love with him. Not with the idea of Alistair Theirin, not with the punishment of an old foe's hands on her. It wasn't even with the idea of home, of Ferelden; somewhere along the line _home_ had become resting her head against his shoulder and listening to him tell stories about the oddly happy times he'd had during the Blight or about his youth in a Chantry monastery. She longed for Ferelden, saw it in his face and heard it in his voice, but _Alistair_ was not _Ferelden_.

Alistair was Alistair.

She was struck with the foolish thought that he would make a good father. She could imagine it too vividly, him lying on his back in the sun with a young child sprawled on his chest, tiny hands fisting in his shirt and rosy mouth parting in a yawn. Him with an older child in his arms, spinning around until they both fell dizzy to the ground. And her with a rounded belly or a babe in her arms, nestled against her breast, with soil beneath her feet and the familiar smell of an early Cloudreach rain on its way in the air.

But she had given that all up, and she tucked the thought away as she turned the iron band over in her fingers again. That was the life of a farmer's daughter, something she had ceased to be when she first took up a sword, when she knelt to receive her knighthood, and when she left the bounds of Ferelden.

He would have made a good father, though.

She looked to the door, closed now again between them, and slipped the ring onto one of her calloused, roughened fingers.

  
**\--**   


When he saw the ring on her finger when she met him at their usual table, she thought his startled, pleased laugh would draw the attention of the entire tavern. He reached across the wood and grabbed up her hands, thumb sliding over the metal.

"It's not much," he said, "but I wanted you to have it."

"What does it mean?"

His grin was lopsided and he glanced away. "Whatever you want it to."

  
**\--**   


Cauthrien was gathering up her effects, her armor and her sword, her meager belongings, her tokens from her bedside table, when the letter arrived. Alistair was the one to open the door for the serving girl, making a joke that if it were somebody here to take her back to her sell-sword ways, he'd defend her honor.

Instead, it was an elf girl, no more than fifteen with curling blonde hair and a faint blush at Alistair's stammered, friendly greeting, and she handed over the letter with a quiet murmur of, "For Messere Cauthrien."

 _Messere_. Cauthrien shook her head as Alistair promised it would find its way into her hands and closed the door.

"A letter," she said, lips quirking. "On the day I pack up to move to the barracks. Who is it from?"

Alistair didn't respond, instead walking to her side and holding it out to her.

The folded, oiled envelope was sealed with the crest of the Ferelden Crown. Her heart stopped and her blood boiled one moment and ran cold the next. She reached out to take it with trembling hands and nearly dropped it.

"Anora," Alistair breathed, and Cauthrien nodded, brow furrowed, unbelieving.

"Anora," she said and ran her thumb beneath the wax to break the letter open.

It was written in a fine, looping hand, and she moved over to the window for more light, leaning against the sill. She read the words in a haze, then read them again, and a third time.

"Is she calling for my head, then?" Alistair murmured, having come to stand behind her, hands settling on her shoulders. He didn't pull her back against him as he usually did, and his attempt at humor died on the air between them.

"No," Cauthrien said with a faint shake of her head.

"Does she mention me at all? Perhaps I need to come around and dance the Remigold for her at the next visit from Orlesian dignitaries?" His jokes grew more strained still, the tension in his arms and shoulders translating to the way his hands pressed against her.

Her laugh was thin and came unbidden. "No, not that."

"Then what?"

"I've been pardoned." Cauthrien swallowed, throat dry and close. "Pardoned. I'm not in exile anymore. I could return on the next ship, if I wanted to. She says- she says to come home."

He didn't respond. She heard his breathing catch, felt his hands tighten on his shoulders. His thumbs, which had been stroking soothing paths along the back of her neck, stopped.

"... And will you?" he finally asked, the words rough and uncertain.

She stared at the letter. The handwriting was familiar, the diction unmistakable. She even knew the ink. If she concentrated, she could even convince herself she smelled the fields along the Hafter River, the stench of the Denerim sewers, the piercing clarity of the air in the Frostbacks in the height of summer.

She tore the letter in two.


End file.
